An enterprise scanning system implements protocols that allow for entities to route documents that enter the system via a scanning device according to rules determined by system administrators and/or users of scanning devices. An example enterprise scanning system is Distributed Scan Management (DSM) implemented by Microsoft and deployed in Windows 7/Windows 2008 Server R2.
An enterprise scanning system that is implemented using DSM (a “DSM system”) allows a user to authenticate user data via a DSM scanning device and to select from one or more sets of post scan processing instructions that are made available to the user. A set of post scan processing instructions (PSP) contains instructions for routing acquired documents, including one or more destinations to which acquired document data should be sent. For example, a PSP may indicate that acquired document data should be emailed to one or more email addresses, copied to one or more specified file servers, uploaded to one or more specified websites, etc. A PSP may also include, among other things, settings for data acquisition such as color style, acquisition resolution, file format type, etc.
After a user is authenticated and has selected a PSP, the user may introduce a document to the system, e.g., by scanning document data into the system at a DSM scanning device. The DSM system routes the acquired document data according to the selected PSP.
DSM systems process and disseminate acquired document data regardless of a security classification of the data, which may be inappropriate if there is a security issue with the acquired data. To illustrate, because scanning currency is illegal, there is a security issue when a user scans currency. In this situation, it would be more appropriate to delete the scanned currency data than to disseminate the scanned currency data according to the PSP selected by the user for the scan data. Thus, it would be advantageous for a DSM system to allow administrators to manage acquired document data according to a security classification of the data.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.